Streaming of media content (e.g., video or audio content) over wide area networks (e.g., the Internet, a carrier-specific network, etc.) is a growing industry fueled at least in part by advances in high-bandwidth network infrastructures. A media streaming service provider may leverage such network infrastructures to provide a media streaming service (e.g., an over-the-top video streaming service) to end users of the media streaming service.
End users of the media streaming service may utilize a variety of access devices to access and consume streaming media content by way of the service. The access devices may have a wide variety of technical specifications that provide myriad different sets of media processing capabilities. For example, access devices may have different display screen sizes, display screen resolutions, graphics processing chips, media format processing resources, network settings, network connections, and memory storage resources.
Because of the wide variety of technical specifications of access devices that may be used by users of a media streaming service, a provider of the service faces a dilemma in choosing how to allocate service provider resources in order to stream media content that is well suited for the variety of technical specifications of the access devices and that minimizes operational costs to provide the service. One approach is to maintain a unique, “best fit” version of media content for each unique set of technical specifications of the access devices. However, the operational costs to maintain copies of all of the different “best fit” versions of the media content (e.g., at multiple data centers in a content delivery network) is typically high.
Another approach is to maintain and use only a single version of media content to provide a different, “best fit” version of the media content to each access device. While this approach may reduce the operation costs associated with media content storage and maintenance, the operation costs to perform on-the-fly processing to convert (e.g., by live transcoding) the stored version of the media content to different “best fit” versions of the media content on demand is typically high. In addition, the on-the-fly conversions may introduce unwanted delays into media streaming operations.